97 per cent of the world to be destroyed tomorrow!

No, not really. It's just my little joke, based on pretending to take people like the BBC's resident climate activists David Shukman, Richard Black and Roger Harrabin seriously.

I'll tell you what doesn't amuse me, though. Here I am in Wales, on my holidays, enjoying the semi-sun, and suddenly I get emails from and Tweets from sensible people on my side of the argument saying: "Help! Help! The BBC has gone mad for this story about the NASA satellite showing that 97 per cent of Greenland has melted and apparently it's 'unprecedented'. What do we do?"

Sigh. The right thing to do on occasions like this, I find, is to head straight for Watts Up With That? Unlike, say, the BBC, or the Guardian, or the Independent or most of the rest of the MSM, WUWT's posts are grounded in actual science and real world data.

And, yep, WUWT makes two very simple points.

1. 97 per cent of Greenland hasn't melted. (If it had we'd be underwater by now)

I’m sure our readers don’t really need to have it pointed out that the melting event did not melt 97% of Greenland’s ice sheet, but rather occurred over 97% of the surface area of the ice sheet and that the melting event has ended. We will undoubtedly be treated to that 97% statistic for a long time to come.

2. "Unprecedented" is not a strictly accurate adjective to describe something that has happened before.

I had to laugh at the title of their press release, where they cite “Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Melt”, then contradict themselves when the main researcher goes on to say “melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889“. Do these guys even read their own press releases? Climatologist Pat Michaels concurs saying: “Apparently NASA should start distributing dictionaries to the authors of its press releases.”

Quite. But the broader point to be made is this: don't believe what the BBC (or NASA or the Royal Society or the Guardian or the Independent or the National Academy of Sciences or the Prince of Wales or Al Gore or any US TV broadcaster that isn't Fox) tells you about global warming, the environment, climate change, polar bears, sustainability, ocean acidification, glacier melt or Greenland, EVER.

Catastrophic Man Made Global Warming is a hoax. There is no real-world evidence whatsoever to suggest that the modest warming of around 0.8 degrees C which the planet has experienced since 1850 is in any way dangerous or unprecedented. Even the suggestion that it is mostly man-made is at best moot, at worst long since falsified by real world data and superseded by more plausible theories

So next time you hear the BBC (or similar) spouting some unutterable crap about some amazingly shocking new event/piece of research/paper showing that the glaciers or Greenland are melting faster than before, that polar bears or coral reefs are becoming more endangered, or that there's anything remotely worrying about the possibility that the planet has warmed by 1.5 degrees C since the Industrial Revolution, don't just take it with a huge pinch of salt. Treat it with about as much respect as you would a report from North Korea radio telling you that this year's bumper grain harvest has been more gloriously plentiful than ever before and that workers are now at severe risk of expiring due to an excess of nourishment, plenitude and joy.